Considering it is advertised as a lifetime program I would argue any money you put into a lifetime program is an investment.

Point taken, but if you buy google adwords to promote a local business, it's an investment for you (and you would likely track ROI on your ad purchases internally) but revenue for them. Google would not see you as an investor (you don't own shares of Google) but as a customer.

You even, in past posts indicate possibility of return of initial investment in relation to current prices on market but was also more so in steem days.

Return of initial investment is subject to our return policy, and it requires a qualifying event (a material change to the program since the accounts initial enrollment). Our last qualifying event was when Hive SBI forked from Steem Basic Income at the time of the Hive fork from Steem. Our next qualifying event will be when we complete our 2.0 release (likely in the upcoming quarter). Any accounts that are enrolled on Hive only will not qualify for refunds under our policy until the next qualifying event.

Also in my exp when price of either steem or hive would rise so would value of vote except now.

The vote value rises with the Steem/Hive price, but usually on a delayed basis (3-5 days minimum, sometimes longer) and not with a perfect correlation. When price goes up, inactive accounts become active again and it negatively impacts some of our sustainability metrics.

Right now the votes will be very wonky because of the node issues we've been having. There's no new pending balance accrual for hours at a time when it gets stuck, and then it will catch up several rounds of accrual when we detect it and enter replay. We are injecting a better alert processes to detect and remedy node issues more quickly as part of our 2.0 roadmap, but at present we have to either monitor the logs regularly or have somebody inform us when votes are being missed. If it's a long interval before we detect it (this time was about 20 hours) and node issues continue while we try to catch up, it can take a long time to resolve.